Wednesday night, six months after doctors diagnosed that Kay Yartymck needed a new liver, the 36-year-old Bethlehem resident received a transplant in Presbyterian University Hospital, Pittsburgh.

Earlier that day, she telephoned home to tell her husband John, "I'm getting a liver tonight. I'm going to start getting better every day."

Mrs. Yartymck, of 1418 W. North St., entered the Pittsburgh facility for the second time Jan. 14 after tests revealed she would benefit from a liver transplant.

She suffered from primary biliary cirrhosis, a condition doctors suspect is hereditary since one of her sisters, Georgia Apotsos, also of Bethlehem, has undergone treatment for a less severe case of the disease.

A team of doctors flew to Dallas early Wednesday to remove the liver from an unidentified donor, John Yartymck said. "They notified the doctors in Pittsburgh that the liver was suitable and told them to get her ready."

At 7 p.m., three hours after she learned a liver was available, Kay entered the hospital's surgical ward. A team of 17 doctors and nurses worked for 12 hours, removing and replacing her diseased liver.

Internal bleeding, from an open artery, forced the doctors to operate a second time Thursday morning, Yartymck said. Within two hours, Kay was resting again in the hospital's intensive care unit.

New liver recipients are listed routinely as being in critical condition and placed in the intensive care unit until doctors are certain the patient's body won't reject the donor organ, Yartymck was told. "She's doing exactly as the doctors predicted at this point. She isn't quite awake but, so far, there have been no further complications."

After she is discharged, within a month or two, Kay will stay nearby, visiting the facility twice a week for monitoring. Then, for the rest of her life, she will take an anti-rejection drug, cyclosporine.

"She was in fairly bad shape last week," he said. "She had just recovered from a bad infection and had been on antibiotics for five days. Luckily, she was off them when the liver became available; otherwise, the surgeons wouldn't have been able to operate."

"She was literally withering away," said her sister, Mary Valiantos, also of Bethlehem. "She was thin, her immune system was down and so were her spirits."

"Way back in October, when it was first diagnosed that she would need the transplant, we never dreamed it would take so long," she said. "But this is the beginning of everything."